Technology for Storytelling

The EditDroid: Rise and Fall – Trailer VOD

A very good documentary about the EditDroid. When I worked at Disney Imagineering, we were using laser disc players in a lot of places, including EPCOT starting the 1980s. We were also innovators and early adoptors of nonlinear editing and video to film matchback.

From the film’s website;

The EditDroid was (one of) the first nonlinear electronic editing system and used several laser disc players loaded with the raw footage of a film. The simple computer interface was unique for its time. After a short period of success the EditDroid disappeared from the film scene and George Lucas sold the machine’s patents to a small company called Avid.

I highly recommend the book Droidmaker: George Lucas And the Digital Revolution. It is also available as an iBook and on Kindle.

This book ventures in territory never explored, as Rubin-a former member of the Lucasfilm Computer Division-reconstructs the events in Hollywood, in Silicon Valley, and at Lucas’ private realm in Marin County, California, to track the genesis of modern media. With unprecedented access to images and key participants from Lucasfilm, Pixar and Zoetrope-from George Lucas and the executives who ran his company, to the small team of scientists who made the technological leaps, Rubin weaves a tale of friendships, a love of movies, and the incessant forward movement of technology. This is a compelling story that takes the reader into an era of technological innovation almost completely unknown